Students often ask about free programs
they could use at home, and sometimes people ask about the
range of free and commercial programs available. Here is some information:
Audio waveform editors: This is the kind of
program we use in Linguistics 103, Introduction to General Phonetics,
for making and listening to audio recordings, and for simple waveform
manipulations.
Completely free: Audacity (PC and
Mac) , KISS Wave
Editor (PCs; scroll down a bit on their page), spwave (PC, Mac,
Unix). Note free Plug-ins for
Audacity.
Free trial version: Amadeus (Mac only), AudioEdit Deluxe and Blaze Media Pro
(PCs), Easy Audio
Editor, Bias Peak (Mac)
Others (not free): Wave Editor (and other
advanced versions of KISS - for PCs), SoundEdit16 (Mac), Goldwave, Audition
(for PCs - formerly CoolEdit/CoolEditPro), AudioEdit Deluxe and Blaze Media Pro,
Bias Peak, SoundForge
(for PCs-Audio Studio is the affordable one) and check Apple's listings.
We used to use Amadeus for Ling.103 because Audacity
did not have an input level display during recording, and Amadeus,
which was available in the CLICC, did. Audacity
now has an input level monitor, and is now available in the CLICC. Since
Audacity, unlike Amadeus, is free and works on both Macs and PCs, we now
use it for Ling. 103. However, Amadeus is still available in the Phonetics
Lab on a Mac.
Acoustic analysis systems:
This is the kind of program we use in Linguistics 104, Experimental
Phonetics, and in Linguistics 111, Intonation (we use the
PC/Macquirer family). Full systems like these tend to have much
steeper learning curves than the waveform editors above, especially if
they are designed to be very flexible and powerful (like Praat). Note
that Wavesurfer is included on the CD that comes with the 5th edition of A
Course in Phonetics.
Completely free: Praat,
SIL Speech Analyzer,
Wavesurfer,
VoceVista, Speech Filing System
Undergrad Neri Adam writes about using the
SIL Speech Analyzer to do Ling. 104 exercises:
A good program that one can manipulate sound
files with at home is the SIL Speech Analyzer. After downloading
the program for free from http://www.sil.org/computing/catalog/speechanalyzer.html
this is what you can expect to find: The program only accepts WAV
files, so whatever files you are using have to be converted to that.
After opening the program you can open a WAV file and start manipulating.
What will show up first on the screen is the waveform and the F0 of the
sound file. To highlight a portion of the graph you have to click
with the mouse and drag, while holding down the control key. Using
the options on the toolbar you can zoom in or out, or listen to the sound
file. If you would like to see the spectrogram then you need to
click on “graphs” and then “types.” Then you need to pick the option
that lists a spectrogram. To modify the spectrogram to your liking
you will need to go to “graphs” and then “parameters.” The standardized
version comes in color, but you can change that to monochrome, to look like
the graphs that we are more used to in the Ling department. If you
want to see the formants, this is where you choose that option also.
This program does not have log files or calculations in milliseconds, so it
is a little different from PCQuirer.
With this program you can measure the durations
of segments such as consonant clusters and vowels. There is a measurement
box in the bottom right hand of the screen to view your measurements.
With this method you can also detect the frequency of formants and the
frequency of the pitch.
Our page of links to Praat info and
scripts for common 104/111 tasks (thanks to Kevin Ryan for this)
Free trial version: MITSyn
Others: SciconRD's PCQuirer/MacQuirer
(has downloadable demo), Kay
Elemetrics's MultiSpeech (CSL is their premium product, with its own
A/D hardware), Avaaz's CSRE (has downloadable
demo), Sensimetrics's
Speech Station 2
File format converters can be crucial
when using these different programs
Here is a free one that handles many formats: Switch
Last updated May 2006 by Pat Keating
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